Discover Salt Lake magazine’s music section. Here you’ll find previews and reviews of upcoming local concerts and performances in Salt Lake City, along the Wasatch Front and Back, and around Utah to help you discover great live music and events.
Ben Weiss invited some musician friends he knew, Zach Downes and Andrew Nelson, to jam at a party for a few hours with a musician he’d never really played with, Katia Racine. “Three hours flew by,” Weiss says, “So at the end, we all looked at each other and said ‘Well, we should start a band.’” And that’s how the Salt Lake-based band Pixie and the Partygrass Boys was born four years ago.
Since being joined by Amanda Grapes on fiddle, the band has been an important part of the Salt Lake music scene. On any given night you might find Pixie and the Partygrass Boys as the opener at The Commonwealth Room, playing a regular gig at the Hog Wallow or at their once-weekly bluegrass jam at Gracie’s.
Part of the band’s popularity is their genre-busting style—Weiss describes the band as “non-traditional bluegrass with heavy jazz and funk influences. “The crossover of playing Stevie Wonder with a bluegrass band seemed like a no-brainer for us,” says Weiss. “People who love bluegrass get to see something they might not usually see at a bluegrass show, and people who don’t normally like bluegrass might find something that they do like because we’re playing something familiar with a bluegrass style.”
And while the band started with a lot of covers, these days they play more and more of their own music. “Every member of the band is a composer,” says Weiss, “We all write songs then get together as a band to arrange them.” The fans are happy with the transition, too, he says, “It’s a really special thing to watch our fans come because we are fun and we play songs we write and now they come and sing along to songs we’ve written.”
Ultimately, Weiss says the goal of the group has always been the same, “When we started this band we wanted to have fun. We wanted to play music people could dance to and we wanted to have a creative outlet to express ourselves freely. We always try to have the most fun in the room, and you know, sometimes we do. It’s not traditional but we always keep it ’grassy.” —Christie Marcey
Kate MacLeod was classically trained on the violin as a young child but now she plays the fiddle. “A fiddle costs a few hundred dollars and a violin costs a few thousand,” she jokes. “It really comes down to style. There’s no difference between the instruments.”
MacLeod’s style is a unique Americana-meets-Celtic, with a touch of her Quaker peace-making sensibilities thrown in for good measure. Fresh off an 11-week artist-in-residence program at the Pendle Hill Quaker Study, Retreat and Conference Center in Pennsylvania, where she created “peace motivating and inspirational music,” she’s more ready than ever to take on the folk tradition of uniting people through music.
To that end, the singer-songwriter-and-composer has released songbooks containing sheet music so that others can learn to play her compositions. “I’m putting these pieces in a book so that people can play them themselves so that they can be part of music,” she says, “It’s living and breathing music.”
MacLeod says her advice to anyone who wants to play or compose music is simple. Do it. “I create music based on what I see and feel around me right now and I believe people can create music in the space they are in,” she says, adding, “Don’t sit on the sidelines—create. Music is supposed to enrich your life.” —Christie Marcy
Michelle Moonshine didn’t know she was a musician—she thought she just liked music. “When I was 16, I went to a music festival and met a bunch of people like Tony Holiday and Talia Keys,” she says. “I was like, ‘Wow.’ It was the first time I’d ever seen real live music, so after that, I would sneak into Hog Wallow to see their shows, then I started hanging out with Tony Holiday and watching him play all the time and I started playing guitar and singing.”
It turned out, she’s a bit of a prodigy. She started sneaking into the bar around October and picked up a guitar for the first time in December. She had her first gig on St. Patrick’s day a few months later. And not long after that, she was on tour with Holiday. MacLeod says her advice to anyone who wants to play or compose music is simple. Do it.
Moonshine has been a working musician for eight years—she quit her last 9-5 job to pursue music full-time the week she found out she was expecting a child four years ago. “I played the whole time I was pregnant,” she told Salt Lake magazine, as her son sat beside her watching cartoons on her iPhone. “I played until December and I had him on January 1. I had a big belly and a guitar and he would just kick and kick and kick.” Her music still bonds them, she says. “If he doesn’t like what I’m listening to he tells me to ‘Play a mommy song’—he wants to listen to my music all the time.”
It’s hard to describe Moonshine. Her voice is equal parts Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss. Even Moonshine isn’t sure how to explain it. “I used to say honky-tonk but without a drummer, we’re not that,” she says. “I say Americana now. It’s a blend of everything. It’s super safe.”
What she and her bandmates—guitarist John Davis and bassist Bronk Onion round out the trio—lack in drummers, they make up for in songwriting. They primarily perform original tunes, though, she says they don’t rule out covers. “I’ll ask for a list of ten songs from people and if I like the tune I’ll learn it and then I know it forever,” she explains. “We even did Beyonce for someone walking down the aisle at a wedding once.”
“It just makes sense to me,” she says of her music. “It’s kind of crazy how everything came together. All my friends were doing a lot of drugs—two of them died and a bunch went to rehab. I was in the same boat and then I started playing music. Music saved me for sure. It’s an obsession.” —Christie Marcy
Up until he was 23 years old, Morgan Snow’s sole ambition was to become a professional baseball player. But after playing college ball in Myrtle Beach, S.C. and after several attempts with pro-MLB tryouts, he decided to let go of his big-league dreams. Soon after this life-altering choice, Morgan bounced around a bit and found himself working the door at a dueling piano bar. A friend and co-worker started teaching Morgan how to play guitar. Adjusting to life without baseball, music became his new outlet, “I started to practice guitar for hours a day and getting lessons every night after the bar shift.” In 2005, Morgan’s guitar guru was killed in Iraq. Years later, one of the Triggers & Slips’ first songs “Old Friends,” was inspired by this friendship that gave Morgan a new purpose and direction.
Triggers and Slips started simply with Morgan on vocals, guitar and harmonica and continues to develop and evolve. For instance, Four Letters, Triggers and Slips’ self-titled album, brings a modern take on honky-tonk. By the third album (The Stranger, expected to be released in Fall of 2019) Morgan has added a full-on six-member band. The new record was recorded live to tape in single takes, which Morgan says gives the music spontaneity and freshness.
“You need to be prepared, being live, there are no go-backs,” he says.
These sessions took place at Man vs. Music Recording Studio under the guidance of legendary local producer Mike Sasich, who has lent his skills to local bands like Thunderfist, Joe McQueen and others. The album comes across (deliberately) like a group of friends at a party, jamming together in the living room until the wee hours. Morgan says they really wanted to stumble upon “those subtle imperfections that come through. That’s what people fall in love with.”
Along with Morgan, Triggers and Slips is John Davis- lap steel, dobro, electric guitar, harmonies and occasional lead vocals, Greg is on the Midgley piano and organ. Tommy Mortenson plays bass, Eric Stoye on drums and Page McGinnis on guitar, and mandolin. Morgan jokes: “I like to be the least talented person on the stage, and so far, I feel like I have been able to achieve that.”
In 2010, when a 7 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti just outside of the capital city of Port-au-Prince, Getro Joseph was just 8 years old. When he was 13, his world changed again when he saw a man playing the cello in Port-au-Prince and told his mother he wanted to take up the instrument. “I don’t know what happened,” says Getro. “I couldn’t stop playing. I don’t know what it was. I don’t think I can ever explain it.” In 2017, Getro’s dedication to the cello earned him a place in the Haitian Orchestra Institute, an educational outreach program that allows Musicians of the Utah Symphony to travel to Haiti and teach more than 100 Haitian musicians during an intensive week of workshops and demanding practice. In support of the institute, violinist Hilary Hahn will perform at a benefit concert in Park City on Sept. 14.
The program continued in 2018, with more Utah Symphony musicians traveling to Haiti to teach, including director Thierry Fischer. In 2019, protests and ongoing political unrest in Port-au-Prince made travel too risky, and, in 2020, COVID-19 thwarted their efforts again. This August, an earthquake, even stronger than the one in 2010, shook Haiti, killing and injuring thousands. It’s one of the multiple crises Haiti has seen this year, including the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and Tropical Storm Grace. Needless to say, the return of the Haitian Orchestra Institute will have to wait at least one more year.
Violinist Hilary Hahn will play a benefit concert for the Haitian Orchestra Institute in Park City, Sept. 14, 2021 (Photo by Dana Van Leeuwen)
Utah Symphony musicians John Eckstein and Yuki MacQueen, co-founders of the institute, are eager to return to Haiti to teach in 2022. MacQueen, a violinist, says she often hears from her Haitian students that music is their refuge. “I’m always struck by their dogged determination to practice,” she says, “despite the noise in their communities.”
Eckstein, likewise, says he is touched by students’ working through even the most difficult of circumstances. “We, as humans, have always created art in difficult times. It’s a necessity.”
Getro holds out hope that music and programs like the Haitian Orchestra Institute can help people through the turmoil and heal some of the divisions in Haiti. “We don’t always get along,” he says, referencing a deep history of classism and strong political divides, “but when we play together, we can become friends. We don’t care about social class.”
The outreach program can allow for this, at least partially, because it brings together students from all over Haiti regardless of social strata. “We select students solely based on their auditions, merit and preparation,” says Eckstein. While the nuances of the class system may be lost on the Utah musicians, the institute tries to incorporate Haitian culture into the program as well by incorporating works by Haitian composers and enlisting a Haitian assistant conductor.
In addition to Hahn’s performance, Getro, who is currently visiting the United States to learn more about teaching other musicians, will speak at the musical education benefit concert in Park City. Billed as a salon, the concert will be an intimate affair at Goldener Hirsch Residences on Sept. 14 at 6:30 p.m. “It’s rare to get to see someone like Hilary Hahn perform so up-close,” says Eckstein. “She’s a superstar in our field. Normally, she’d be performing for audiences of 3,000, not a few hundred.”
Hilary Hahn (Photo by Dana Van Leeuwen)
Hahn is a three-time Grammy Award-winning violinist as well as a prolific recording artist and commissioner of new works. Her 21 feature recordings have reportedly received every critical prize in the international press. In March of this year, Deutsche Grammophon released Hahn’s 21st album, Paris, recorded with Finnish conductor and violinist Mikko Franck and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. Paris features the world premiere recording of classical composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Two Serenades, a piece written for Hahn and completed posthumously by Kalevi Aho. The album also includes performances of Ernest Chausson’s Poème and Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, a long-time signature piece of Hahn’s.
According to Eckstein, Hahn showed great interest in the work done by the Haitian Orchestra Institute but vetted the program thoroughly before agreeing to support it. All of the symphony musicians volunteer their time, so the proceeds will all go to cover the operating costs of the Spring 2022 program.
Getro, now 19, attends high school in Mirebalais, Haiti, where he also teaches cello to 13 of his own students. Working on pedagogy is another important aspect of the Haitian Orchestra Institute, teaching the students to become music teachers themselves. He and other participants in the program share a dream that it can one day lead to the formation of Haiti’s own national orchestra, which the country currently does not possess. “Music breaks barriers,” says Getro. “It gives life—hope and life.”
The last time Neko Case performed at Red Butte Garden, she had a chance encounter with nature that felt like, in her own words, something straight out of The Jungle Book. Before her performance, Case and her band explored the gardens and happened upon a rattlesnake. Later that day, the group learned from Red Butte staff, the same snake appeared again as a group of kids on a field trip goggled at a nest of adorable swallows near a pond. The snake slithered to the nest, the children watched in anticipation and the rattlesnake immediately ate every single bird. The band kept going back to see the snake, who was now triumphantly perched by the empty nest.
Case recounted the story, laughing at the image of tiny birds “peeping away inside his fat little body,” between songs at her return to Red Butte Garden on Sunday. She even dedicated a song to this memorable snake, appropriately called “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth.” The anecdote, a brutal, darkly funny illustration of the cycle of life, even sounds like it could come from a Case song—her lyrics often contain animal metaphors and vivid descriptions of the natural world.
Photo courtesy Red Butte Garden
It’s hard to imagine a venue more appropriate for Case than Red Butte Garden’s Outdoor Amphitheatre. Not only is Case fascinated with the wilderness’ unforgiving beauty, but her titanic voice is a force of nature unto itself. Onstage surrounded by mountains, Case’s vocals filled the space with visceral power, often with an assist from her band. (Case said that the haunting harmonies in her song “Halls of Sarah” “would not be possible without awesome singers,” pointing to her bandmates.) Her most startling vocals came early in the concert. At the climax of “Hell-On,” the title track of her latest album, Case ditched the recorded version’s quiet howl and unleashed a primal, cathartic yell. It lasted for a seemingly impossible length of time, stretching the contours of her unhinged, beautiful voice. In this moment, Case made good on the promise of the song’s lyrics: “I am not a mess/ I am a wilderness.”
Case’s gripping voice carried through the entire setlist, which featured six tracks from Hell-On, other favorites from her two-decade-plus solo career and covers of diverse artists including Crooked Fingers, Roky Erickson and Catherine Irwin. Fans were lucky that the concert happened at all—after a Saturday show in Reno, Case’s tour bus broke down. The band took a last-minute flight and, thanks to some quick thinking from the Red Butte crew, the concert went off without a hitch. After a stressful weekend, Case was more than a little sleep-deprived, and her loopy humor was a needed antidote to her frequently dark music. In between songs, there were plenty of friendly jabs about Reno after the band’s misadventures. Throughout the night, she offered scattered thank yous before eventually expressing gratitude to all of SLC: “we owe you fucking big time Salt Lake City,” she said.
Photo by Ebru Yilidz/Courtesy Red Butte Garden
The concert opened with a set by A.C. Newman, Case’s New Pornographers bandmate. (Newman also performed in Case’s band after his own performance.) Even compared to Case’s simple staging, Newman’s setup was spare: just him and one additional guitarist. He performed stripped-back versions of his solo material—his latest album, Shut Down the Streets, was released in 2012—and some favorites from the New Pornographers. (“We are popular in certain circles,” he said drily.) Openers have a thankless job, even when the artists’ fan bases have significant overlap, and compared to the raw energy of Case’s performance, Newman’s casual, quiet arrangements felt underwhelming. Still, Newman’s good-natured vibe, mixed with some self-deprecating humor, set the night’s casual, friendly tone. “We’re just playing with our friend Neko,” he said before starting his performance, and the intimacy between the artists was always clear.
The concert ended with a performance of one of Case’s most popular songs, “I Wish I Was the Moon” from Blacklisted. By the time she got to the song’s post-chorus: “I’m so tired/ I wish I was the moon tonight,” she burst into uncontrollable laughter. The sleep-deprivation finally seemed to catch up to her—the repetition of “I’m so tired” was almost too on-the-nose for the situation—and Case explained that, once again, she couldn’t stop thinking about the rattlesnake. Hopefully by the next time Case comes to Red Butte, she will have written the snake a song of his own.
Read more from our arts section. Get more information from Red Butte Garden’s Outdoor Concert Series at their website.
What a bummer. The Park City Song Summit announced this week that in the interest of safety this year’s event is not going to happen. This, after we devoted two whole tantalizing pages to the event in our latest issue. It promised to be a high-powered event with the likes of Father John Misty, Mavis Staples, Keller Williams’ Grateful Gospel, Iron & Wine, Fruit Bats, Josh Ritter, Andrew Bird and dozens more on the now-defunct bill. And, while we applaud the abundance of caution and the PCSS organizers facing the reality of rising coronavirus cases in Summit County, we don’t have to like it.
Park City Song Summit will be postponed this year in the interest of public and artist safety. “Our ICUs are at 100% capacity. Our county went from ‘MODERATE’ to ‘HIGH’ level of transmission late last week. School-age children are being admitted in increasing numbers to our local hospitals with the COVID delta variant. And late last week we matched our single-day high for new positive COVID cases,” says Park City Song Summit founder Ben Anderson. “After countless conversations with top health officials, infectious disease experts, and local government, we cannot hold this multi-day, festival-style event safely this year and will need to postpone the Song Summit until 2022,” said Anderson. He added, “This is the statement I never wanted to write, but it’s what the current COVID climate has required us to do.”
Anderson says Song Summit organizers have tried their absolute hardest to make the event work in the current mid-pandemic environment. “We’ve tried valiantly to adapt to the rising dangers by moving all of our long-scheduled indoor events outside, reducing our capacity significantly and implementing various COVID protocols, but even these extreme precautions were not enough to overcome the risk of a dangerous COVID-19 spread,” Anderson adds.
Park City Song Summit is targeting Sept. 8-11, 2022 for its new dates. Refunds will be issued within the next 14 business days. Follow Park City Song Summit on social media for the latest updates. The team behind Park City Song Summit has been so moved and inspired by the support of artists and fans and would like to express their gratitude in advance for your understanding and patience as they build toward 2022.
After this story was published in our print issue and online, Park City Song Summit organizers announced that the festival will be cancelled in 2021. Read the update here.
What Is the Park City Song Summit?
The Park City Song Summit (PCSS) is no ordinary music festival. “It’s kind of like South By Southwest meets a TED Talk,” says PCSS founder Ben Anderson. More than 100 artists—each of them invited to be an artist-in-residence for the entire week from Sept. 8–12—will participate in a variety of events ranging from spirited concerts at venues like Deer Valley’s Snow Park Amphitheater and the Eccles Center to intimate Labs held in small venues on Main Street. A unique combination of live performances and discussion of craft build an edifice to the songwriting experience for audiences to connect with.
The Man With the Plan
Park City Song Summit founder Ben Anderson; Photo by Angela Howard/ Courtesy Park City Song Summit
“My dad was a gospel recording artist, so music’s always been part of my family,” says Anderson. He spent three decades working as a trial lawyer but hasn’t stopped performing live since he was in sixth grade, most recently with the Grateful Dead tribute band Aiko. After retiring from the courtroom, Anderson quickly found his way back to music. “Music adds dimension to our existence. I couldn’t stay away.”
The seeds of the PCSS were sowed when Anderson organized the Park City Songwriter Festival in 2019, blooming into this year’s event. “I love the history of music, how the shoulders we’ve all stood on from the most primal rhythm create notes and harmonies that affect the soul. Just like a song begins to take form, we took influence from people and places that inspire us to create something truly different.”
Beyond the Songs
Father John Misty; Photo by Emma Tillman
The Labs set PCSS apart from the ordinary. Some Labs are Masterclass-style discussions about songwriting. “It’s about the process and what makes songwriters tick. How do you take things from the muse we call life and distill it into three minutes we’ll keep coming back to forever?” Anderson explains. Others are unscripted conversations about mental health and addiction issues plaguing the music industry with artists like Langhorne Slim.
There are even visits with polymaths like SNL alum Fred Armisen and Olympic Gold Medalist Shaun White as they discuss creativity within music and outside pursuits and the complexities of fame. The Labs are unique opportunities to get inside the music and minds of artists like never before.
The Artists
Keller Williams’ Grateful Gospel; Photo courtesy Park City Song Summit
The lineup is a curated list of talented artists who support the event’s interactive concept. “We’re musical omnivores, so we wanted the lineup to represent the fabric of the music community with inclusivity and a variety of genres,” says Anderson. Highlights include performances from the likes of Father John Misty, Mavis Staples, Keller Williams’ Grateful Gospel, Iron & Wine, Fruit Bats, Josh Ritter, Andrew Bird and dozens more. See a full list of who’s playing live tunes and talking songwriting on the PCSS website.
Supporting the Cause
Fred Armisen; Photo courtesy Park City Song Summit
“Lots of people in the music industry are suffering,” says Anderson. “Being on the road, isolated and away from family is difficult, especially when it’s overlaid with mental health and addiction issues. We want to make the conversation around that less taboo and bring it into the open, so it’s easier for people to find the help they need.”
In addition to approaching the topic within some Labs, PCSS aims to achieve the goal by partnering with local and national nonprofit organizations addressing mental health, addiction recovery and suicide prevention issues.
Ticket Options
“There are so many different types of people who are music lovers. It was really important to us PCSS had something accessible for each one,’ Anderson says.
People who want to do it all can buy festival passes starting at $1,500
There are also ala carte tickets. Individual event tickets are available as well, with more affordable options including entry to premier shows at Snow Park and Eccles Center starting at just $50. Tickets can be purchased on the event website.
Poor Red Butte. After cancelling their popular summer Outdoor Concert Series last summer, organizers and fans hoped for a back-to-normal season in 2021. This seemed within reach just a couple of months ago, but, as we all know by now, the Delta variant had other plans. As case numbers rise, many artists are requiring masks or vaccines for attendance, moving to outdoor venues or ditching performances entirely. Earlier this week, Counting Crows cancelled their planned concert at Red Butte because the venue, which is part of the publicly supported University of Utah, cannot legally enforce mask or vaccine requirements. It was a reminder that, even as musicians and fans desperately want to return to live music, the reality is still complicated.
There will hopefully be no last-minute change of plans for Red Butte’s next concert. This Sunday, Neko Case will take the stage with special guest A.C. Newman. The pair have recorded and performed together for more than 20 years as members of the indie rock collective the New Pornographers. Newman will open the show and perform in Case’s backing band.
Case has earned acclaim and devoted fans for idiosyncratic music that defies easy categorization. Her earliest albums recreated old-school country and Americana, but since her 2002 breakthrough Blacklisted, Case has blended indie folk, alternative rock and power pop into her ever-evolving sound. As a songwriter, she is just as likely to experiment with opaque character studies or unexpected commentary as she is to pull directly from her own life experiences. Take her song “This Tornado Loves You,” from Middle Cyclone, a bizarrely sweet love song from the perspective of a literal tornado. Or there’s “Man,” her winking, unusual exploration of gender identity from The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight…, that begins with “I’m a man/ That’s what you raised me to be/ I’m not an identity crisis/ This was planned.”
Case’s lyrics often describe harrowing personal experiences and heartbreak, but even—or especially—when writing about difficult subject matter, she retains a sly sense of humor. On the strange cover for her most recent solo album, Hell-On, Case wears a headpiece made of fake cigarettes, her hair on fire as she looks away. (The album was written after Case’s Vermont home burned down, though she says any connection between the real-life tragedy and the cover photo is a coincidence.) This playfulness carries through her lyrics too. On “I’m From Nowhere” from her album The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight…, she sings “I was surprised when you called me a lady/ ‘Cause I’m still not so sure that that’s what I wanna be/ ‘Cause I remember the 80s/ And I remember its puffy sleeves.”
A.C. Newman. Courtesy Red Butte Garden
And then, of course, there’s her voice. One critic called it a “moonbeam … imposing in timbre, opalescent in tone and always surprising in its sheer force.” People tend to wax poetic about Case’s muscular, striking contralto, which can be just as difficult to pin down as her songwriting. Her distinctive vocals are often noted for their visceral power, but Case is just as comfortable going quiet with a simple, beautiful melody, like on Blacklisted’s “I Wish I Was the Moon,” perhaps her most well-known song. “I never knew where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do with my voice,” she says, “but I just wanted to do it so bad.”
Though Case is well established as a solo artist, she is also recognized for her work with other musicians. In her early career, she performed with a backing band as Neko Case & Her Boyfriends, and in 2016 she released an album with fellow singer-songwriters k.d. lang and Laura Veirs. Her best known collaboration is with the New Pornographers; both she and Newman have been with the supergroup since its founding in 1997. Newman is generally considered the group’s leader—he has been the chief songwriter and lead vocalist on the Pornographers’ eight critically acclaimed albums, most recently 2019’s In the Morse Code of Break Lights. His most recent solo project, Shut Down the Streets, was released in 2012. The album combines the pop sensibility he honed with the New Pornographers with punk-inspired songwriting. “I felt the need to be more clear in the lyrics on this album than ever before,” he says. “Not worry so much about the poetry of it. It felt like the message really had to be clear.”
Neko Case and A.C. Newman will perform at Red Butte Garden Ampitheatre on Sunday, Aug. 29. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are on sale at the Outdoor Concert Series website. See the full Red Butte summer lineup and Salt Lake’s guide on how to Red Butte.
A bit shy of 20 years ago, I was a 13-year-old kid excited for my first-ever live rock show. I had won a pair of tickets to Counting Crows at the USANA Amphitheatre from a local radio station, and, in true 8th-grade fashion, I was going with my mom. The band had just released Hard Candy, its fourth studio album, and one of the first albums I ever owned. I remember the concert itself was a blur of energy, dancing on the grass, bright lights and scream-singing along to songs I still know by heart. While I have been to many rock shows since, I, like many, remain sentimental about my first time.
Even at the risk of going from sentimental to positively drippy, I admit I was in love with the idea of seeing Counting Crows again this year. They were set to play this week at Red Butte Garden’s Outdoor Concert Series, and I would get to relive the untamed, childlike joy of that first show. I would spread out my blanket on the grass, and, just like I did back then, dance around and sing along to all of those same songs. It’s been a hard 18 months; why not indulge in some blatant and shameless nostalgia? Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen, and it’s all the Utah State Legislature’s fault. Yes, Utah lawmakers are ruining my childhood.
Counting Crows cancels Salt Lake City stop on The Butter Miracle 2021 Tour (photo via countingcrows.com).
If you too were planning on attending the Counting Crows show, then you already know it was canceled. The Counting Crows will not be “hangin’ around this town,” and you have the Utah lawmakers who passed and the governor who signed H.B. 308 to blame. The bill prohibits a governmental entity from requiring a vaccine for COVID-19. So what does that have to do with Counting Crows? I’m getting to that.
COVID-19 cases are back on the rise, fueled by the Delta variant. In Utah, the average daily rates of new coronavirus cases are back to where they were in fall 2020. Back then, we were all pretty squeamish about going to events like concerts and most traveling musicians had long ago canceled any planned tours. Unlike last fall, we now have a vaccine that makes you much less likely to develop a serious coronavirus case. Of course, we actually have to get the vaccine for it to work.
This is all to say, touring bands and musicians who may have canceled their tours last fall are ready to rock this time around if people are ready to prove they’ve been vaccinated for coronavirus. This is the case with Counting Crows. The band announced on their Facebook page that, starting Aug. 21, all Counting Crows concerts would require fans to produce either a negative COVID test within 72 hours of the show or proof of full vaccination. It’s their show; they should get to do whatever they want, right? Well, not if the great State of Utah has anything to say about it.
The Counting Crows would have performed on stage at Red Butte Garden, which is on the University of Utah campus. The university, as a state school, falls under the law’s definition of “governmental entity.” That means, under H.B. 308, the venue can not require people to show proof of vaccination at the Counting Crows concert or any other event (should another performer insist on vaccine mandates), so the band had to cancel the show, and it is all the State’s fault.
In a statement to ticket holders, the band says as much, “Unfortunately, due to state mandates in Utah, the venue for our Salt Lake City show on Aug. 26 at Red Butte Garden is unable to enact our Covid-19 entry protocols so we have made the difficult decision to cancel the show.”
The band goes on to say, “This is a decision we didn’t make lightly but we must continue to prioritize the health and safety of our fans and crew. Stay well and we’ll see you next time, SLC.”
The venue likewise apologized to would-be concert-goers, saying, “We are all disappointed that the Counting Crows concert has to be canceled. If you are planning to attend other concerts at the Garden this summer, we look forward to seeing you soon. We appreciate your understanding and support of Red Butte Garden’s Outdoor Concert Series.” You can learn more about getting a refund to the Counting Crows show on the Red Butte Garden website.
Because of the State ban on vaccine mandates, private venues might be at an advantage when it comes to attracting touring musical performers who want some assurances, especially if more bands decide to require vaccines. The State Room is requiring proof of vaccination or a negative test result for attendees. Live Nation also announced that it will require proof of vaccination at its venues like USANA Amphitheatre and The Depot.
At the time of this posting, about 60% of eligible people are fully vaccinated in Utah, according to the Utah Department of Health (UDOH), and the FDA has granted full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for people 16 years old and older. In a statement on the FDA announcement, the UDOH says, “Full FDA approval is the final step in a rigorous approval process to confirm the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. The FDA’s announcement should provide confidence to anyone who may have hesitated to get the vaccine while it was under emergency use.” (I think the health department is looking at you, 40% of eligible Utahns who are still not fully vaccinated.)
Most Americans also support some form of COVID vaccine mandates. According to a poll from the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, concerns about contracting the coronavirus are at their highest level since January but confidence in vaccine effectiveness against new variants has remained largely unchanged. More than half of Americans support vaccination requirements for government workers, members of the military and workers who interact with the public, like at restaurants and stores. About 6 in 10 support vaccine mandates for hospital or other health care workers.
No matter where public support lies, any change to the State’s policy on vaccine mandates would require another act of legislature unless it becomes subject to lawsuits like unto the Utah law that prohibits schools from mandating masks. In the meantime, it remains free to ruin more childhoods like mine.
